by Sam McClellan | Apr 9, 2024 | Books |
Toni Ortner’s chapbook, Focused Light from a Distant Star, is a collection of 39 ekphrastic poems and prose poems. Most were inspired by the works “created by women in the last two centuries,” says Ortner in her Preface including Natalya Goncharova,...
by Sam McClellan | Nov 7, 2022 | Books |
Toni Ortner’s poems use a language which is simultaneously sumptuous and spare to create a detailed world woven of reality and dream, sometimes both at once. Out of what seem to be simple materials- people, animals, plants, natural landscapes and sometimes...
by Sam McClellan | Aug 29, 2022 | Books |
“In her 26th book, Blue Lyrics, Toni Ortner—- through free-verse lyrics as well as tightly crafted prose poems in which she addresses and acknowledges Picasso, Van Gogh, Brueghel, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Adrienne Rich, and Diane Wakoski—hits all the big...
by Sam McClellan | Aug 29, 2022 | Books |
Toni Ortner’s Daybook V, Change of Season, documents the daily thoughts of the Vermont poet and writer who reflects on life in the times of COVID. Uplifting but tinted with the bleakness of the era, Change of Season, blends both poetry and prose in her diary of...
by Sam McClellan | Aug 29, 2022 | Books |
Toni Ortner is a truth teller, even when it hurts. She leaves the reader amazed at her ability to vividly describe the challenges of everyday life and the need for the imagination as a curative. Ortner takes her inspiration from Virginia Woolf ’s claim that a diary...
